Read Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont Online

Authors: Adam Lazarus

Tags: #Palmer; Arnold;, #Golfers, #Golf, #Golf - General, #Pennsylvania, #Sports & Recreation, #Sports, #United States, #Oakmont (Allegheny County), #Golf courses, #1929-, #History

Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont (30 page)

BOOK: Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont
7.87Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
“I had to go over two terraces,” he said. “It was the best putt I’ve ever made.”
Now one under par for the championship and back in the race, Heard climbed up the leaderboard. On numbers eleven and fourteen, he landed short irons inside of ten feet and one-putted for birdies.
Heard rebounded from a bogey on number fifteen to strike his finest shot of the day from the sixteenth tee. With the course still soft from intermittent rains, he floated a four-wood to within eighteen feet of the cup and rolled in yet another sizable putt.
“I had a couple putts that if there hadn’t been any rain I would have gone way past the cup,” he said after the round. “Rain is great for a player who misses fairways; he knows he can throw his ball to the green and can make it stop . . . it’s just like throwing darts.”
And when Heard stuck another shot onto the green on the eighteenth, a chance to tie Gene Borek’s 65 came with it. His long birdie putt on the home hole died inches shy of the cup, but the five-under score marked the second-lowest round in Oakmont’s history. Although few members of the field broke par that day, Heard believed Oakmont was in “the easiest condition we’ll ever find it.”
Heard wasn’t the only member of his twosome to have a career day on Saturday, or to blister his way into the U.S. Open lead.
John Schlee, a well-traveled thirty-four-year-old in his eighth year on tour, had also experienced a strange opening round. A long hitter, Schlee tallied unpardonable numbers (bogey, double bogey) on Oakmont’s two front-side par fives. A pair of birdies on the back nine salvaged his day, for a respectable 73.
The following afternoon, “sprinkler Friday,” Schlee started red-hot, birdying three of the opening four holes. His final score of 70 pushed him up the leaderboard into a tie for eleventh place, only six strokes off the lead. Still, Schlee’s underdog-makes-good story was lost in the headline-making achievements of Borek, Giles, Ziobro, and Fezler on Friday. In fact, the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
added insult to injury by leaving Schlee’s name entirely off the list of players. Even during his finest season on tour, Schlee could not sidestep obscurity.
Four months before the U.S. Open, Schlee had won the prestigious Hawaiian Open—the $40,000 payday was more than he’d earned during his first three seasons on tour. And in the months that followed, Schlee twice contended during the final round of notable tournaments. A week after his Hawaii victory, he was the also-ran at the Bob Hope in a final Sunday threesome with Palmer and Nicklaus, ultimately finishing sixth. And just days before traveling across the state from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, Schlee scored well enough to earn fifth place behind Tom Weiskopf at the IVB Classic.
Several high finishes helped Schlee pay his bills easily—no small achievement for a man who’d barely scraped out a living for much of the past decade. In 1973, Schlee redirected his goals toward the major championships: In four previous majors, two National Opens, and two Masters, he had never finished higher than thirty-sixth.
Schlee built on his consistently excellent 1973 play to take top medal honors in the U.S. Open sectional qualifying event at Las Colinas Country Club in his hometown of Dallas, and signed a new lease on golf life.
“In the past, I’ve put too much emphasis on the major tournaments. I’ve always practiced too much and too hard. I’ve never done any good in a major event, I feel, for this reason. So I’m going to go at it different.... I’m going to treat it just like another tour tournament. You know, that’s the way Ben Hogan did it. I don’t know if he and I have much in common, though.”
The gangly, garrulous Schlee—though a onetime student of Hogan—could
never
be mistaken for the somber “Wee Ice Mon,” as the Scots dubbed him. Neither could his golf game. While Hogan’s strategic brilliance and consistent ball striking were legendary, Schlee’s swing was quirky; he rarely played an uneventful round. But Schlee posted a magnificent score at Oakmont on Saturday that was once synonymous with Hogan.
Lucky to escape the second hole with a bogey—his tee shot sailed far off-line and lodged in a tree, forcing him to declare an “unplayable lie” and take a penalty stroke—Schlee seemed headed for a typical afternoon of clawing and scratching just to stay near par. He had posted five bogeys, a double bogey, and six birdies during the first two rounds, and had played the six par-five holes miserably in two over par. And even on Saturday, Schlee’s erratic play continued: “He was under trees, in the rough, and buried in traps most of the day.” Much like his playing partner Heard, however, Schlee’s scorecard shimmered.
A birdie on number five returned Schlee to even par. He also birdied the par-five ninth despite landing his approach in thick, green-side rough. And on the fourteenth, he drove into a fairway bunker but recovered to within fifteen feet of the flagstick, then rammed in the putt for another wacky birdie. Seemingly the only “bad break” that befell Schlee on Saturday occurred when his nine-iron into the eleventh green rolled in, then out, of the cup to prevent an electrifying eagle. A very un-Schlee-like birdie on number seventeen—a three-iron off the tee, followed by a wedge to within five feet—knocked another stroke off par. By the end of the day, Schlee’s four under 67 (32 on the more difficult back nine) matched Hogan’s course record from 1953.
Even more than his swashbuckling style of play, Schlee intrigued the press with his eccentric personality. In the late 1960s, he became curious about his horoscope, and as his career developed, so did his formal study of astrology.
“This is a good week for Gemini,” said the June-born Schlee, who persuaded a Pittsburgh reporter’s wife to lend him three astrology books so he could stay up-to-date. “Mars is in conjunction with my natal moon. My information was fed to a computer, which didn’t know I was a golfer, and it said: ‘This is an exceptional month. You will do good in athletic events outside.’”
Schlee had horoscopes printed for all of the tour regulars; whether they wanted them or not, he occasionally placed them in his fellow pros’ lockers. Not surprisingly, Schlee did not dare to convey his astrological musings to his mentor. The quintessential “old-school” Hogan had already chastised Schlee for wearing gaudy, expensive alpaca sweaters on the course, and surely scoffed at his experimentation with triangular-headed woods, an adjustable system of weights for his driver, and a cross-handed putting style. From the cast of colorful characters who comprised the early 1970s professional golf scene, no one seemed more
unlike
Hogan than his self-proclaimed disciple, John Schlee.
 
IN CASE THE YOUNG LION Jerry Heard or the New Age John Schlee hinted at a shift away from the tour’s old guard, two veteran heroes stepped up on Saturday to speak for the prior generation.
The great Walter Hagen, winner of the U.S. Open in 1914 and 1919, once proclaimed that “Anybody can win one Open but the man who can win again is quite a golfer indeed.” Billy Casper’s failure to make Friday’s cut left just three such men to play over the weekend. Two of them—Nicklaus and Trevino—battled side by side and had long been accustomed to the spotlight. The third member of that elite U.S. Open fraternity was Julius Boros, one of the most underrated players in PGA tour history.
Born in 1920 to an immigrant Hungarian family, Boros came of age during the Great Depression. During World War II, he served in the Air Force Medical Corps but spent all four years stateside at a base in Biloxi, Mississippi. The former captain of his high school golf team, Boros routinely played at a course near the base, and upon his discharge, he returned to his native Connecticut and took a job as an accountant.
Again Boros didn’t stray far from golf: He worked for the Rockledge Country Club in West Hartford. In 1948, he finished second in the Connecticut Open, and recorded the lowest U.S. Amateur qualifying score in the New York metropolitan area. That year, he also played in the prestigious North & South Open in Pinehurst, North Carolina, an event that changed his life.
Boros finished second in the tournament and deeply impressed his fellow runner-up, Sam Snead, who urged him to turn pro. He also met a young woman from Massachusetts named Judith “Buttons” Cosgrove, who soon became Mrs. Boros.
Boros and Cosgrove shared more than just a New England background. Soon Buttons would win several women’s golf championships, including the Charlotte Open in 1949 and, the following year, the Massachusetts state championship and the Silver Falls tournament, also at Pinehurst. Her father, Frank Cosgrove, owned the Mid Pines Golf Club in North Carolina; after Boros turned professional, Frank promptly hired him as Mid Pines’s club pro.
Only six months into his career, Boros made the cut in the 1950 Masters tournament and, showcasing a fondness for the tight course setups favored by the U.S.G.A., finished ninth behind Ben Hogan in the 1950 U.S. Open at Merion. Even better, in 1951 Boros won the Massachusetts State Open two weeks after finishing fourth—again behind Hogan—in the U.S. Open at Oakland Hills.
That September, Judith gave birth to the couple’s first child, and Julius rushed home midway through the Empire State Open in Albany to meet his new son, Jay Nicholas. Unfortunately, three days after the delivery, Judith suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died at the age of twenty-three.
“For a while, Julius never wanted to play again,” said Peggy Kirk Bell, a competitor and friend of Buttons. “But then he kept on, because he knew that she would have wanted it that way.”
Boros returned to the tour two months later, and the following summer, at the Northwood Club in Dallas, he stunned the golf world by stealing the U.S. Open from Hogan, who appeared to have his hands on a third consecutive national title. Trailing Hogan by four strokes entering Saturday’s double-round final, Boros was the only man to break par over the final thirty-six holes. Never known as an outstanding putter, Boros sneaked up on the game’s greatest player and snatched victory with just forty putts over the final twenty-seven holes.
Eleven years later, at age forty-three, Boros again chased down a U.S. Open crown. At The Country Club in Brookline, experts considered Boros one of the few players equipped to overtake the four-to-one favorite, Arnold Palmer. A winner of two events during the previous five weeks, Boros stayed hot in an Open that saw scores inflate dramatically as a result of blustering winds and a course battered by a harsh New England winter.
Boros hung within a few strokes of Palmer and the leader, Jacky Cupit, prior to the start of the final round. By keeping his ball underneath the near-gale-force gusts (no golfer matched par in either round on the final Saturday), Boros stayed in contention all day. He then fired birdies on the seventieth and seventy-first holes to pull even with Cupit and Palmer, forcing a play-off the next day. Boros smashed both his challengers in Sunday’s play-off: Cupit by three strokes, Palmer by six.
Boros dealt Palmer another bout of major-championship heartbreak by shooting a closing-round 69 to eke out a one-stroke victory in the 1968 PGA Championship. Just as he had done in 1952 in Dallas, the forty-eight-year-old Boros won that week at San Antonio’s Pecan Valley Golf Club and shocked the Texas gallery. He was the oldest man to win a Grand Slam event, and the image he cast on the fairways reflected his age.
“His [swing] is like molasses falling over hot biscuits. Sometimes it looks as if he might fall asleep on the backswing,” Associated Press writer Will Grimsley observed. “He is a middle-sized man who you can tell likes to eat. A better than adequate bread basket hangs over his belt buckle.”
Complementing his relaxed but deceptively powerful swing were Boros’s simple philosophy and humble approach to the game.
“Play a round of golf with me and I hope you will relax and enjoy yourself. That’s what I plan to do. People worry so much about their games. You can see them out there on any weekend, fidgeting over every shot as if the U.S. Open depended on it. Wind direction, downhill lie, trapped green—is this the right club, maybe a six-iron would have been better, spread the stance a little wider, recheck the grip... endless worry,” he once wrote for Sports Illustrated. “Your life doesn’t depend on it. Not even your living. Now, mine does, but when I find that playing golf is work and that I’m beginning to worry about it I’ll switch to something else. No game is worth the agony that some golfers go through, and that includes a few of my fellow pros on the tour.”
To reinforce his low-key, easygoing attitude, Boros played a relatively casual tour schedule. After Judith’s death, he married Armen Boyle in 1954 and the couple had six children. Aside from traveling the world to play in exhibition matches and sightsee, he loved to fish and hunt. Sportswriters and family members alike lovingly described Boros with one adjective: placid.
“He’d come home from a tournament,” one of his brothers recalled, “and we’d all jump up and ask him how he did. If we were lucky he’d say, ‘won,’ or, ‘I lost.’ Usually he’d say, ‘It’ll be in the papers tomorrow.’”
Braced by that tranquil perspective, Boros competed well into his “twilight” years and remained a strong threat to win wherever he showed up. Besides cruising to a Senior PGA title in 1971 (he also posted runner-up finishes the next two years), Boros won nearly $100,000 in prize money during his first two seasons after turning fifty.
Boros kicked off the 1973 PGA tour season in grand fashion, sinking consecutive fifteen-foot birdie putts to start the first round of the season’s initial event. At the Glen Campbell Los Angeles Open, a bogey-free round (he missed just two greens) gave him a share of the first-round lead; he finished the tournament tied for tenth. And during the early spring months, he tied for ninth in the Byron Nelson in Dallas and then, two weeks later, finished fifth in the Colonial at Fort Worth.
BOOK: Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont
7.87Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Mystic City by Theo Lawrence
Rebel Without a Cake by Jacklyn Brady
Dark Dreams by Rowena Cory Daniells
United We Stand by Eric Walters
Sourmouth by Cyle James
To Bed a King by Carol Lynne
The Romantic by Barbara Gowdy